With huge thanks to presenter Sean Rocks for his always warm and engaged welcome, here’s our chat about the poems in my latest collection of poems, Hedge School. I read the title poem, as well as ‘Neighbours Make a Neighbourhood’, dedicated to my late neighbour Jamie Moore. And there’s quite a bit of talk about birds and bees and hedgehogs, and urban foxes (“I’m not a naturalist by any means. I’m closer to being a naturist than I am a naturalist,” is a statement that I may live to regret!)
Interruptions and distractions and emissaries and visitors from an otherness – the creatures of the natural world; the ‘retraction’ rather than the restrictions of the lockdown period (“Some people might say we were restricted but I think I retracted into a certain sapce. You know you catch your finger in a door and you retract it, if you’re intelligent… So we retracted into a limited circuit, a limited radius; and that was an invitation, if you want to see it in a cosmic sense, to say where we are a little bit more deeply. And there is that extension of that idea that if we Think Globally and Act Locally, that somehow we can help to right the crazy imbalances that are going on in the world at the minute, from all the hostilities that we are involved in, in fact – we’re not just witnesses to them – we’re involved in them … TW Adorno said famously, you know that line, ‘No poetry after Auschwitz’. But there’s another argument to say that after something like Auschwitz or during it is exactly the time we need poetry.”